My question is what i the best way to make myself appealing to prospective employers even though i am currently not working?
Thanks
This is because about 80%-90% of the time, employers (and even more, recruiters) aren't looking at all at any of your intrinsic traits, but rather at proxies, e.g. where you went to school, who you worked for.. and how long you worked there.
That is to say, to a large extent their logic goes like this: "I don't have time to parse all of this candidate X's attributes and traits; but I can see that entity E (school,employer) has conveyed the following attributes {a1,a2..} to candidate X in the recent past. So as a matter of expediency, and to get make some headway this inbox of resumes before I need to get coffee again, I'll just X++ or X-- accordingly."
And it also happens that one of the must highly valued attributes they have is whether the candidate was recently (or even better, is currently) employed by some company they consider to be cool (by whatever criteria).
Of course, it's perfectly fair to say you wouldn't want to work for an employer with such a shallow way of looking at the world... and that anyone who's willing to just close their eyes, and look at the real you not only won't ding you for taking off a year to live in a squat in Barcelona with your hot girlfriend, work at a coffeeshop, and not only start to learn from scratch, but make commits to the source tree to some emerging language Y that's decades ahead of its time, albeit with precisely zero value in the current job market... but might even find you a potentially much more valuable, well-rounded candidate for having done so.
But the vast majority just don't think that way, course.
"MUST HAVE: PHP 5.4 w/ Code Igniter, mastery of the latest jQuery plugins..."If you absolutely have to address it, and you don't, "I took a few month to explore some projects and refresh myself, and now I'm itching to get back into big challenges like $MY_WHAT_A_LOVELY_COMPANY_YOU_HAVE_THERE."
Work on your code portfolio. You should have your own site where you collect and publish work and ideas. Lots of people use GitHub for this too.
Keep your brain in shape by taking a course on Coursera or Udacity.
Go code. Open source. Port your first game to HTML5/canvas, just for the kicks. Pick up new language. Record a screencast of hello world of some technology you like. Port an algorithmically interesting code, eg a hashing function from some language to another. Start a blog. Do an interview with a few founders of recently announced startups about their technology stack, write about it. Get involved in hackernews discussions. There is so much to do!
Whether you get money or not, keep coding, keep creating, keep passionate about making bits dance. Job/money will come.
Most hiring managers at bigcorps aren't nearly so clueless, but a lot of them take a, how to put this, long-term view of things... and don't always know about from GitHub or SO, let alone what cachet they have in hacker communities.
So again, it can be a, let's not say perfectly viable, but viable-ish strategy to bank on one's commit history on GitHub, and other proxies like Stack Overflow... if you're content, and secure enough in your market value to stick to the 5% of the employers that value these kinds of markers very greatly.
But for the other 95%, not so much.
As many others have said, just don't explain the gap. Instead say "hi, I can code, interested?".
Groovy for startups -- as are things like having a cool Twitter handle, making pithy remarks in SO, etc. If you're exclusively interested in startups, that is.
But for the vast majority of employers out in, you know, the general universe out there -- not so much.
Just have something to talk about in the interview.